Related papers: On the weak-coupling limit and complete positivity

Complete positivity of quantum dynamics is often viewed as a litmus test for physicality, yet it is well known that correlated initial states need not give rise to completely positive evolutions. This observation spurred numerous…

We generally study whether or not the information of an open quantum system could be totally erased by its surrounding environment in the long time. For a harmonic oscillator coupled to a bath of a spectral density with zero-value regions,…

We discuss a qubit weakly coupled to a finite-size heat bath (calorimeter) from the point of view of quantum thermodynamics. The energy deposited to this environment together with the state of the qubit provides a basis to analyze the heat…

While it is well known that complete positivity guarantees the fulfilment of the second law of thermodynamics, its possible violations have never been proposed as a check of the complete positivity of a given open quantum dynamics. We…

We consider the quantum dynamics of two spin-1/2 systems, each coupled to a bath of oscillators, so that a bath-mediated coupling is generated between the spins. We find that the interactions destroys any coherent motion of the 2 spins,…

It is commonly assumed that a large system, weakly coupled to a thermal environment through its boundaries, relaxes quasistatically towards the new equilibrium even when the temperature of the environment changes abruptly. Here we show how…

We present a comprehensive study of the static properties of a mobile impurity interacting with a bath with a few particles trapped in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. We consider baths with either identical bosons or distinguishable…

When coupling thermal baths at different temperatures, negative differential thermal conductivity is typically attributed to nonlinear interactions in the connecting medium. In this work, we demonstrate that such an effect can arise purely…

We study the dynamics of an open quantum system interacting with a non-thermal bath. Here, "non-thermal" means that the bath modes do not need to have the same temperature, but they have an effective temperature distribution. We find that,…

We study the steady state of a three-level system in contact with a non-equilibrium environment, which is composed of two independent heat baths at different temperatures. We derive a master equation to describe the non-equilibrium process…

A frequently desirable characteristic of chemical kinetics systems is that of persistence, the property that if all the species are initially present then none of them may tend toward extinction. It is known that solutions of…

Cooling of a quantum system is limited by the size of the control forces that are available (the "speed" of control). We consider the most general cooling process, albeit restricted to the regime in which the thermodynamics of the system is…

We study relaxational behavior from a highly excited state for a composite system in partial contact with a heat bath, motivated by an experimental report of long-term energy storage in protein molecules. The system consists of two coupled…

We show that two, non interacting 2-level systems, immersed in a common bath, can become mutually entangled when evolving according to a Markovian, completely positive reduced dynamics.

An entangled multipartite system coupled to a zero-temperature bath undergoes rapid disentanglement in many realistic scenarios, due to local, symmetry-breaking, differences in the particle-bath couplings. We show that locally controlled…

We consider what happens when a many body localized system is coupled to a heat bath. Unlike previous works, we do not restrict ourselves to the limit where the bath is large and effectively Markovian, nor to the limit where back action on…

The zeroth law of thermodynamics involves a transitivity relation (pairwise between three objects) expressed either in terms of `equal temperature' (ET), or `in equilibrium' (EQ) conditions. In conventional thermodynamics conditional on…

We study the temporal evolution of entanglement pertaining to two qubits interacting with a thermal bath. In particular we consider the simplest nontrivial spin bath models where symmetry breaking occurs and treat them by mean field…

We investigate the possibility to suppress interactions between a finite dimensional system and an infinite dimensional environment through a fast sequence of unitary kicks on the finite dimensional system. This method, called dynamical…

Strongly correlated systems far from equilibrium can exhibit scaling solutions with a dynamically generated weak coupling. We show this by investigating isolated systems described by relativistic quantum field theories for initial…